[R] Using Aggregate() with FUN arguments, which require more than one input variables

[Alexander Erbse]

as.matrix()  will not help here. I will get the same error message.

And also, I don't need correlation matrices. I simply need a vector of correlations. I will show you some code and data I am using.

Here you can see my main dataframe:

> head(test)

     industry       date    testvar       retf1
1 Industrials 2004-12-31 1174382477 -0.02240908
2 Industrials 2005-01-31 1101039133  0.08080221
3 Industrials 2005-02-28 1211723486  0.05646877
4 Industrials 2005-03-31 1253428861 -0.05743186
5 Industrials 2005-04-30 1152846793 -0.02928415
6 Industrials 2005-05-31 1070386589  0.05865941

Now I want to take column "industry" or "date" or both - whatever - as grouping columns for correlations between testvar and retf1 as follows:

> numbers <- test[,c("testvar","retf1")]

> head(numbers)
     testvar       retf1
1 1174382477 -0.02240908
2 1101039133  0.08080221
3 1211723486  0.05646877
4 1253428861 -0.05743186
5 1152846793 -0.02928415
6 1070386589  0.05865941


> groups <- test[,"industry"]

> head(groups)
[1] "Industrials" "Industrials" "Industrials" "Industrials" "Industrials"
[6] "Industrials"

> head(unique(groups))
[1] "Industrials"        "Telecommunications" "Financials"        
[4] "Utilities"          "ConsumerGoods"      "OilandGas"

AND NOW:

> aggregate(numbers,by=list(groups),FUN="cor")

Fehler in FUN(X[[1L]], ...) : supply both 'x' and 'y' or a matrix-like 'x'

So my desired output is a vector of correlations between subsets of x = "testvar"  and y = "retf1". The length of the resulting vector will be length(unique(groups)).

I think this draws a clearer picture to you. Sorry for not precisely pointing it out in my first post.

Thanks and Regards!


-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Uwe Ligges [mailto:ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de] 
Gesendet: Dienstag, 17. Januar 2012 19:21
An: Alexander Erbse
Cc: r-help at r-project.org
Betreff: Re: [R] Using Aggregate() with FUN arguments, which require more than one input variables



On 17.01.2012 18:10, RNoob wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I am trying to apply the aggregate() function to calculate 
> correlations for subsets of a dataframe. My argument x is supposed to 
> consist of 2 numerical vectors, which represent x and y for the cor() function.
>
> The following error results when calling the aggregate function: Error 
> in FUN(X[[1L]], ...) : supply both 'x' and 'y' or a matrix-like 'x'. I 
> think the subsets aggregate puts into cor() are sort of list types and 
> therefore can't be handled by cor().


as.matrix() will probably help, but since you have not specified your reproducible code, we cannot show how to change that.

Uwe Ligges


> Can anyone provide me with a solution?
>
> Regards,
> RNoob
>
> --
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